Slips out bank office back door after barricading self inside

(see related)
(ANSA) - L'Aquila, January 13 - A business association
leader in the central Italian city of L'Aquila on Monday slipped
out through a side-door after having barricaded himself in a
bathroom of the local Bank of Italy office to protest conditions
for small businessmen in the city since its devastating 2009
earthquake.

Celso Cioni, president of L'Aquila's Confcommercio
retailers' association gave a phalanx of journalists the slip
and failed even to hold a meeting with a prefect on which he had
conditioned abandoning his post.

Cioni said he wanted to meet with L'Aquila Prefect
Francesco Alecci, after a period of reflection and under more
balanced conditions, a source told ANSA.

The episode began when Cioni attended a meeting in the
offices of Italy's banking watchdog that included a number of
local business association leaders.

"We were in a meeting and we were talking about banking
rules that come into force in February," said Angelo Liberati,
the president of L'Aquila Fida-Confcommercio, an affiliated food
retailers' association.

"There we understood that (the new rules) come at the
expense of small shopkeepers and small businesses. At that
point, Cioni got up and left".

Cioni's colleagues and firefighters worked to persuade
Cioni to abandon his protest, but he continued to say he would
light himself on fire unless he received reassurances from the
prefect that measures would be taken to help small businesses
and shopkeepers.
"If the doors of the bathroom where I am barricaded in are
forced open, I have gasoline and a lighter," Cioni warned.

Cioni called his gesture "a cry of pain from small
shopkeepers of this battered city forced by the earthquake to
leave their stores without obtaining (public) support and
incurring debts".

"There have been suicides," Cioni added, and declared that
he was launching hunger and thirst strikes.